The last time I saw The Tragically Hip was for Canada’s 125th birthday celebration at Molson Park in Barrie in 1992, a few months before the release of Fully Completely and before they became the biggest band in the country. Twenty-four years and eleven albums later, they are playing their final tour after Gord Downie announced he had terminal brain cancer.

We had to put our dog Emma down today. She was a wonderful, loyal pet. I wrote in this post about how our childhood dog died alone overnight at the vet and I’m glad we got to be with Emma at the end. This post is about a time we got into a bad accident in Chile and I thought we were going to have to put her down. She made it almost 10 more years and lived quite a life…

Every year since 2009, around this time of year, I think of a particular day when I was living and working in Chile. Since this year marks the 10th anniversary of the CBC Radio 3 Podcast, I thought this would be a good time to write about it.

Tl;dr – I lived in Chile for a year. I got into a car accident with my dog. A lot of songs from the CBC podcasts of that time remind me of that year. I made a playlist here.

I can’t remember at what age I stopped believing in Santa Claus, but I know there was certainly an absolute end date and that was the Christmas of Grade 4. My family went back to Peru for the first time since moving to Canada and my father told us we weren’t getting anything at Christmas because there wouldn’t be any money for presents. I remember being upset about it and he said “when we go to Peru, you’ll see people who have nothing.” I’ve always remembered that.

While I was whittling down my manuscript, I had to look at each chapter and try to think of it within the context of the whole. This was a chapter that didn’t make the final cut as it didn’t develop the character (by that point in the story, the reader knows the protagonist doesn’t fit in) and it didn’t advance the plot. But I thought it worked well as a standalone piece and the good people over at the Lunaris Review saw fit to give it a home. Here’s a link to the story:

This week, The Lonely Island released a music video for a song that was cut from their new movie, Popstar. The deleted scene for the song, “Fuck Off,” shows Conner4Real (Andy Samberg’s Bieber-esque teen idol character) joyfully belting out the most over-the-top expression of teenage angst possible.

The song is an incredible parody, not least because Samberg and company have caught onto a melodic phenomenon that has plagued the airwaves for the past several years, which they use to great effect at the song’s 40 second mark.

I like to call this melodic snippet the “Millennial Whoop.” It’s a sequence of notes that alternates between the fifth and third notes of a major scale, typically starting on the fifth. The rhythm is usually straight 8th-notes, but it may start on the downbeat or on the upbeat in different songs. A singer usually belts these notes with an “Oh” phoneme, often in a “Wa-oh-wa-oh” pattern…

The last time I saw The Tragically Hip was for Canada’s 125th birthday celebration at Molson Park in Barrie in 1992, a few months before the release of Fully Completely and before they became the biggest band in the country. Twenty-four years and eleven albums later, they are playing their final tour after Gord Downie announced he had terminal brain cancer.

I remember seeing the idea for FOLD grow on Twitter over a year ago to finally coming together. I looked at the lineup and sessions and bought a weekend pass. I liked the idea of FOLD in theory but the reality was so much better than I possibly expected. Everyone involved should be incredibly proud of what they accomplished this past weekend.

The inaugural FOLD event was held at the Peel Art Gallery Museum and Archives centre in downtown Brampton. Although I work about 5 minutes south of this building, I had never been to it before. It’s an interesting building that mixes old and new as an addition was built over an old courthouse that was built in 1867.